He couldn’t get the thought out of his mind. What he’d done, the trust he’d broken.
So he’d managed to take a bath, hoping to ease his sore muscles, and had nearly crawled into bed.
Chaol awoke at dawn, tried to reach for his cane beside the bed, and bit down his bark of pain.
Panic crashed into him, wild and sharp. He gritted his teeth, trying to fight through it.
Toes. He could move his toes. And his ankles. And his knees—
His neck arched at the rippling agony as he shifted his knees, his thighs, his hips.
Oh, gods. He’d pushed it too far, he’d—
The door flung open, and there she was, in that purple gown.
Yrene’s eyes widened, then settled—as if she’d been about to tell him something.
Instead, that mask of steady calm slid over her face while she tied her hair back in her usual half-up fashion and approached on unfaltering feet. “Can you move?”
“Yes, but the pain—” He could barely speak.
Dropping her satchel to the carpet, Yrene rolled up her sleeves. “Can you turn over?”
No. He’d tried, and—
She didn’t wait for his answer. “Describe exactly what you did yesterday, from the moment I left until now.”
Chaol did. All of it, right until the bath—
Yrene swore viciously. “Ice. Ice to help strained muscles, not heat.” She blew out a breath. “I need you to roll over. It will hurt like hell, but it’s best if you do it in one go—”
He didn’t wait. He gritted his teeth and did it.
A scream shattered from his throat, but Yrene was instantly there, hands on his cheek, his hair, mouth against his temple. “Good,” she breathed onto his skin. “Brave man.”
He hadn’t bothered with more than undershorts while sleeping, so she had little to do to prepare him as she hovered her hands over his back, tracing the air above his skin.
“It … it crept back,” she breathed.
“I’m not surprised,” he said through his teeth. Not at all.
She lowered her hands to her sides. “Why?”
He traced a finger over the embroidered coverlet. “Just—do what you have to.”
Yrene paused at his deflection—then riffled through her bag for something. The bit. She held it in her hands, however, instead of sliding it into his mouth. “I’m going in,” she said quietly.
“All right.”
“No—I’m going in, and I’m ending this. Today. Right now.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. All that it’d entail. He dared ask, “And what if I can’t?” Face it, endure it?
There was no fear in Yrene’s eyes, no hesitation. “That’s not my question to answer.”
No, it never had been. Chaol watched the sunlight dance on her locket, over those mountains and seas. What she might now witness within him, how badly he’d failed, over and over—
But they had walked this far down the road. Together. She had not turned away. From any of it.
And neither would he.
His throat thick, Chaol managed to say, “You could hurt yourself if you stay too long.”
Again, no ripple of doubt or terror. “I have a theory. I want to test it.” Yrene slid the bit between his lips, and he clamped down lightly. “And you—you’re the only person I can try it on.”
It occurred to Chaol, right as she laid her hands on his bare spine, why he was the only one she could try it on. But there was nothing he could do as pain and blackness slammed into him.
No way to stop Yrene as she plunged into his body, her magic a white swarming light around them, inside them.
The Valg. His body had been tainted by their power, and Yrene—
Yrene did not hesitate.
She soared through him, down the ladder of his spine, down the corridors of his bones and blood.
She was a spear of light, fired straight into the dark, aiming for that hovering shadow that had stretched out once more. That had tried to reclaim him.
Yrene slammed into the darkness and screamed.
It roared back, and they tangled, grappling.
It was foreign and cold and hollow; it was rife with rot and wind and hate.
Yrene threw herself into it. Every last drop.
And above, as if the surface of a night-dark sea separated them, Chaol bellowed with agony.
Today. It ended today.
I know what you are.
So Yrene fought, and so the darkness raged back.
55
The agony tore through him, unending and depthless.
He blacked out within a minute. Leaving him to free-fall into this place. This pit.
The bottom of the descent.
The hollow hell beneath the roots of a mountain.
Here, where all was locked and buried. Here, where all had come to take root.
The empty foundation, mined and hacked apart, crumbled away into nothing but this pit.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Worthless and nothing.
He saw his father first. His mother and brother and that cold mountain keep. Saw the stairs crusted with the ice and snow, stained with blood. Saw the man he’d gladly sold himself out to, thinking it would get Aelin to safety. Celaena to safety.
He’d sent the woman he’d loved to the safety of another assassination. Had sent her to Wendlyn, thinking it better than Adarlan. To kill its royal family.
His father emerged from the dark, the mirror of the man he might have become, might one day be. Distaste and disappointment etched his father’s features as he beheld him, the son that might have been.
His father’s asking price … he’d thought it a prison sentence.
But perhaps it had been a shot at freedom—at saving his useless, wayward son from the evil he likely suspected was about to be unleashed.
He had broken that promise to his father.
He hated him, and yet his father—that horrible, miserable bastard—had upheld his end of the bargain.
He … he had not.
Oath-breaker. Traitor.
Everything he had done, Aelin had come to rip it apart. Starting with his honor.
She, with her fluidity, that murky area in which she dwelled … He’d broken his vows for her. Broken everything he was for her.
He could see her, in the dark.
The gold hair, those turquoise eyes that had been the last clue, the final piece of the puzzle.
Liar. Murderer. Thief.
She basked in the sun atop a chaise longue on the balcony of that suite she’d occupied in the palace, a book in her lap. Tilting her head to the side, she looked him over with that lazy half smile. A cat being stirred from its repose.
He hated her.
He hated that face, the amusement and sharpness. The temper and viciousness that could reduce someone to shreds without so much as a word—only a look. Only a beat of silence.
She enjoyed such things. Savored them.
And he had been so bewitched by it, this woman who had been a living flame. He’d been willing to leave it all behind. The honor. The vows he’d made.
For this haughty, swaggering, self-righteous woman, he had shattered parts of himself.
And afterward, she had walked away, as if he were a broken toy.
Right into the arms of that Fae Prince, who emerged from the dark. Who approached that lounge chair on the balcony and sat on its end.
Her half smile turned different. Her eyes sparked.
The lethal, predatory interest honed in on the prince. She seemed to glow brighter. Become more aware. More centered. More … alive.
Fire and ice. An end and a beginning.
They did not touch each other.
They only sat on that chaise, some unspoken conversation passing between them. As if they had finally found some reflection of themselves in the world.
He hated them.
He hated them for that ease, that intensity, that sense of completion.
She had wrecked him, wrecked his life, and had then strolled right to this prince, as if she were going from one room to another.
And when it had all gone to hell, when he’d turned his back on everything he knew, when he had lied to the one who mattered most to keep her secrets, she had not been there to fight. To help.
She had only returned, months later, and thrown it in his face.
His uselessness. His nothingness.
You remind me of how the world ought to be. What the world can be.